1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to fatty-oil containing formed confections; in particular it relates to formed chocolate manufacturing methods and to the confections produced by such methods.
Formed chocolate includes chocolate liquor processed for formation into chips, sticks or other arbitrary shapes. What is termed chocolate in the present invention, however, is not limited to the regulatory or other legal stipulations of a particular country (in Japan for example, the Fair Labeling Regulations Concerning Chocolate), but broadly refers to chocolate products of all kinds, such as ordinary plain chocolate in which so-called cocoa substitute fats are employed, milk chocolate, white chocolate, or strawberry-like, etc. colored and flavored chocolates.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, bar chocolate and chocolate formed into drops are representative of chocolate that is eaten as is, but chocolate preparations formed otherwise into sticks or various patterns in order to be easier to eat and to have a neater outward appearance have recently been brought out on the market.
Methods of shaping such formed chocolates include deposit-forming with an extruder, wherein chocolate from a forming machine is deposited directly onto a flat belt or the like and cool-hardened, and molding, wherein chocolate is cast into a previously formed mold and cool-hardened.
In the former case, i.e., in deposit-forming chocolates with an extruder, the viscosity must be adjusted so that the deposited chocolate does not spread on the belt. To achieve desired shapes in deposit-forming, accordingly, it has been necessary to increase the solid-portion content of the chocolate, consequently decreasing the fatty oil content, typically to within 28-33% by weight of the total weight of the chocolate preparation. Formed chocolate products from chocolate preparations having solid and fatty oil content in these proportions as such, however, are unsatisfactory in respect of how the chocolate melts in the mouth (which has been termed "mouth-feel," or "mouth-melt" in the art and will be referred to as "oral dissolvability" hereinafter).
Attempts to improve the oral dissolvability of a preparation for producing formed chocolate by mixing a liquid oil such as soybean oil or rapeseed oil into the fatty oil portion of the chocolate preparation in order to lower its melting point are not effective since this does not alter the large proportion of the content of solids relative to the bulk of the preparation. The consequent approach to improving oral dissolvability is to decrease the solid-portion content, which entails increasing the fatty oil content.
Nevertheless, while increasing the fatty oil content certainly improves oral dissolvability, it lowers the viscosity per se of the chocolate preparation. There is a limited range of viscosity in which the forming or molding functions in connection with a particular manufacturing installation are possible, and in manufacturing, viscosity thus reduced can amount to deterioration in the formability of the chocolate preparation, impeding the forming processes. There consequently has been a limit to the quantity by which the fatty oil can be increased in order to yield formable chocolate of satisfactory oral dissolvability. At present palatable formed chocolate of sufficiently satisfactory oral dissolvability has yet to be seen on the market.